Patricia Correia Gallery is proud to announce new work by Los Angeles based artist Norton Wisdom in his seventh solo exhibition with the gallery, "Cloud Chamber: A 40 Year Journey". Unlike previous exhibitions of Wisdom's paintings, which have focused on a specific body of work, this exhibition of "Cloud Chamber" paintings incorporates the totality of Wisdom's vision. This exhibition contains the most recent works of Wisdom along with works that have been in process for the last 18 years.

The beginning took place at Chinouards Art School in 1963 where John Altoon exposed Wisdom to the works of Gorky. The tension of Gorky's line and color awoke in him a mysterious path of action to putting color down on canvas.

Wisdom went to UC Berkeley in 1967 and discovered the physics of Teller (the H-Bomb maker) and Carpa (the Zen of Physics), exposing Wisdom to the reality of nature, such as the lines left by sub-atomic particles in cloud chambers. The beauty of these cloud chamber lines show the true nature of matter. These patterns of line directed and influenced Wisdoms use of color as line.

Working as an assistant to Peter Voulkos at his foundry in Berkeley, Wisdom spent 4 years pouring and grinding bronze sculptures at the 3rd street studio. Voulkos' beastly abuse of material, both oil and clay, became a benchmark in how Wisdom applied feeling to his canvases.

In this concatenation of events, was a close relationship with abstract expressionist painter Karl Kasten who worked with Hans Hoffman and De Kooning when they were at U. C. Berkeley. He exposed Wisdom to the struggle and majesty of formal art issues. Now line, color, feeling, and form were even more entrenched in the caldron of Wisdoms painting.

"Wisdom has pushed and explored his "trapezoid" imagery with compulsive seriousness for 20 years in every medium and scale.The paintings make countless comparisons: one canvas with another, moving back and forth, checking variations in formal structure, evaluating effects of symmetry, sensing the always changing powers of color, the effects of rhythmic rhymes and assonance, the magic of spatial interval. Each painting measures the relative impact of the character of paint.
Application---ragged or impastoed, thin to buttery, bland to gestural; each physical aspect played against the others in freshened and renewed sequences." -Gerald Nordland, 1993

Norton Wisdom studied art at Chinouards Art School in Los Angeles 1963-1967 and at UC Berkeley 1967-1972. His paintings have been exhibited at The New Museum of Modern Art, Oakland, CA; the University Art Museum, Berkeley, CA; the Milwaukee Art Center; the La Jolla Contemporary Art Museum; and at the Santa Clarita Museum. Wisdom has exhibited internationally at Galeria Carla Fuelr, Munich, Germany; Pyong Taek City Museum with the International Arts Festival, Korea and Lalit Kala Academy, India. His performance art, improvisational screen painting in collaboration with live music, is performed internationally and is a separate body of work.

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PATRICIA CORREIA GALLERY, Attention: Amy Perez, Associate Director
Bergamot Station, 2525 Michigan Ave., Bldg. E-2, Santa Monica, CA 90404
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All artists are represented exclusively in Los Angeles by Patricia Correia Gallery